Hi guys! I know, you haven't seen me in ages... I'm that person that sometimes shows up on livestream and used to help Jenny edit the comic. Now I'm mainly just a friendly face that pesters Jenny and Greg and plays Tera with them.

ANYwho.

I’m also a content writer for a small game company, and I'm working with a team to build a F2P MMO designed around swashbuckling buccaneers and corsairs with Sci-Fi motifs. Our game setting is a sandbox universe where you and your friends are let loose into the galaxy to commit crimes of piracy, smuggling, and other dastardly deeds. It’s a very ambitious project, currently in preproduction.

Thanks in advance, guys. You're a bunch of creative and wacky folks, and I trust your opinions.

Before we even get one line of code in the game though, we’d like to get feedback on our core designs to help bring a better product to the gaming community that will be most pleasing to the most people. If you are interested in helping please continue reading and answer the questions below. Thank you for all your help in advance.

• Players can customize characters and ships. • Players will be free to explore the universe, become a pirate, a privateer, a smuggler, or even a bounty hunter. They can choose from many missions for various factions or anyone with coin. • Players can form crews, either on their ship or someone else’s (PC and NPC Captain’s) and enter space to do what all pirate crews have done in history, look for pillage and plunder.

We want to add in several other factors like a reputation/notoriety system, PVE centered dungeons & adventures, a dynamic quest system and more, but we do not have the resources to fully flesh them out yet. For now we are concentrating on building the core mechanics version of our game.

So down to the core mechanics:

In terms of melee combat, the play will be based around an active offense and defense combat system that requires players to use the mouse position to determine where they attack and defend against targets. We are designing abilities and effects to be based on where attacks or defenses occur compared to you or your opponent’s mouse position and motion. What we are trying to do here is to design an easy to learn but hard to master combat system that supports the swashbuckling feel of high adventure.

In space combat players work together in order to target, disable, and board ships. While on the ship, players will have several roles to fill as part of the crew. Players can man the helm, fire the turrets, call out targets and manage power systems. We are gearing space combat to accommodate both single players and large group crews. We want this to be simple and straightforward--again easy to learn, hard to master.

A central feature of our core mechanics is boarding actions. When a target ship is disabled, it is boarded, and the raiding crew fights the defenders to capture the cargo in the holds and drag it back to their ship. The combat is primarily melee combat; nothing unbuckles your swash faster than rapid fire weapons! There are multiple avenues to victory in boarding. The encounter ends when either the cargo is all unloaded, all the ship’s power conduits are destroyed and the repelling crew is dead OR the boarding party is all dead and their respawner is destroyed. It is up to boarding crews to fight the defending crew and to either unload the cargo or to find all the power conduits used to power the respawners on the target ship. Defenders do have the opportunity to counter-board, and capture the attacking ship which can be very important in PVP play.

Players will be able to build legendary reputations even if they are not crewing with other players. We are creating missions requiring only a personal ship and possibly NPC crewmates that can fill positions for larger ships. These can include bounty hunting, cargo hauling, smuggling, and special missions from reputable and disreputable factions. For the players who want to crew with their friends, we will have ships that require 5, 10, 15 or even up to 30 members. Aside for the obvious pillaging and plunder NPC and PC ships, will you also have the opportunity to act as a spy, fight monstrous space creatures and even find/engage ghost ships and lost cities--and of course, hunt for buried treasure.

________________________________________The questions I’d like to ask are as follows; please use a scale of 1-5 with 5 as the best for the first few and comments if you like, the last few ask for your opinions on what you know of this game.

How much are you attracted to ship to ship combat? (Scale)

How important are non-ship adventures to you (i.e. planet-side or on a station)? (Scale)

How much do you like the idea of hand to hand boarding actions? (Scale)

How important is it for you to have adventures that you can play on your own (i.e. solo missions)? (Scale)

How important is it for you to be able to play with commodities and markets (i.e. player economy)? (Scale)

Would you play this game based on the dynamics described here and why? (Text)

What kind of things would you like to see from a game like this? (Text)

What kind of things would you not like to see from a game like this? (Text)

Do you have any suggestions for any improvements we could make? (Text)

What kind of things would you think could make or break the game for you? (Text)

Just a quick note to thank any of you who have completed our survey, and some encouragement for those who have not! We're still looking for more input- the results of the survey help us to make plans on what will make it to beta testing and also on what groups of people we take our out-of-house alpha paper test and technical testing people from.

So thanks again for your time in reading this, and thanks again in advance for the surveys!